As if reality TV wasn’t bad enough already, there’s an upcoming show that looks like all sorts of wrong: Kid Nation. The advertisements claim “40 children, 40 days, no adults,” which judging from the trailer, is not entirely accurate—there’s at least one big person running the contests and handing out gold stars to the most worthy children. I can’t see how this gets around child labour laws, but maybe they’ve abolished those along with habeas corpus when we weren’t paying attention.
There are so many things wrong with this premise that I don’t really know where to start. Watch the kids performing manual labour as entertainment for an adult couch potato audience! (What’s next: “Pimp My Maquiladora?”) Watch them shout at each other in a display eerily reminiscent of Lord of the Flies! Watch them cry! Watch them cry some more! Every other scene features lurid close-ups of sobbing children.
But hey, there’s something bizarrely appealing about the concept of children running a town free from adult supervision, because it also suggests a world free of adult baggage and expectations. The ads for the show tease at “a better world for tomorrow”; a world better than the one that their parents and grandparents built. Fair enough, which is why you need to watch the trailer. The social experiment is compromised from the get-go.
Because this isn’t a better or different world. This is a nostalgic look back at frontier life, minus the inconvenient indigenous inhabitants. The children have been encouraged to create a right-wing libertarian’s wet dream, a microcosm of harsh class divisions. The gold star incentive (worth $20,000) automatically rules out more co-operative structures—only one child per episode can win it, and as far as I know, they can’t choose to evenly divide the prize money. And worse, they are divided by the host into classes via a competition that pits “kid against kid to determine their pay check and role: labourer, cook, merchant, or upper class.”
This is not a child’s world. This is an adult’s fantasy of the free market, enacted by kids who are competing for their very real futures. They’ll need that prize money for tuition that’s increasingly out of the reach of the working class, and they’ll need it if they or anyone in their family fall ill.
Conclusion: Utterly exploitative and disgusting. Anyone want to tape it for me?
(Nice find, Gynocide.)
I’ve heard that they get around the child labor laws by labeling it as summer camp. And I wonder what libertarians think of the show arbitrarily assigning class status. Don’t they believe that everyone in the upper class earns their place? *rolls eyes*
because it also suggests a world free of adult baggage and expectations
Maybe if they’re young enough to not know how to listen to adults speak?
As for labour laws, there’s a name for that workaround: “actors”
I hope some of the more industrious children dig up roots, turn them into shanks, pass them around, and organize a revolt. “Hi kids! Stick me in your friend’s abdomen!”
Another idea for a show: put all the capitalists together on an island, have them engage in competitions for their lives, and at the end of the season, drop an atom bomb on it.
Apper, oh my god that is funny
I guess they used kids because reality TV is running out of naive, willing adult participants in their evil, torturous “experiments.”